Comedy fundraisers usually follow a familiar conveyor belt format. Acts do their best 10 minutes then make way for the next act to do their best 10 minutes and so on. A big hoorah, then, for Saturday’s unique benefit for Breakthrough Breast Cancer in which a surreal cocktail of musicians and mirthmakers covered the songs of keyboard maestro host, spoof Sheffield songsmith John Shuttleworth.

With large line-ups it is usually mandatory to describe proceedings as hit and miss but this amiably shambolic evening was genuinely hit-packed. Jon McLure of Reverend and the Makers set the tone with a cheeky rendition of the whimsically pro-Yorkshire Shopkeepers in the North are Nice. Things then took a turn for the absurd as Shuttleworth duetted with Barbara Dickson, her calendar-based January, February segueing into his lyric, “May I march in April?” before cod MOR crooner Mike Flowers closed the first half, sailing perilously close to meta-parody with his cruise ship medley of Shuttleworth and Oasis’s Wonderwall.

The second slot raised the bar with Vic Reeves, sporting a Dada-meets-Dad’s Army mix of moustache and battledress, performing Up and Down Like A Bride’s Nightie, “about manic depression”. But the twin peaks came from real musicians. Squeeze’s Chris Difford transformed Fish & Chips into a nostalgic parable that nestled alongside Up The Junction, before Heaven 17 closed with an electronic reboot of Dandelion & Burdock, celebrating fizzy drink, wasp stings and uphill bike rides: “Riding with my peers, I was grateful for my Sturmey-Archer gears”. As Shuttleworth would say, “Oof!”